Excess Identities

By Rand Richards Cooper;

Published: April 9, 1995

HENRY PARK, the narrator of Chang-rae Lee's first novel, "Native Speaker," is the son of Korean immigrants, a boy known as Marble Mouth in kindergarten, when his tongue felt "booby-trapped and dying" as it wrapped itself around
the agonies of English. Grown up now, Henry has taken the classic path of American assimilation while using his adopted language to clear the way to college and a career.

A curious career -- for Henry is a spy. He works for Glimmer & Company, a New York dirty-tricks firm that specializes in what he wryly calls "ethnic coverage," hiring first-generation Americans to keep watch on the immigrant communities
they still have a foot in. For its shadowy patrons, Glimmer & Company keeps tabs on labor organizers, radical students and the like. Henry's job, on behalf of an unnamed client, is to infiltrate the organization
of John Kwang, a city councilman from Queens whose progressive rainbow-coalition appeal is gaining prominence on the New York political landscape.

"Native Speaker" brims with intrigue and political high jinks, but Mr. Lee, who came to this country from South Korea when he was 3 years old, is no spy novelist. His interest lies in language, culture and identity; for him, the spy makes a
convenient symbol for the American immigrant. "Speak enough so they can hear your voice and come to trust it," Henry's spymaster boss lectures him, "and no one will think twice about who you
are." We may consider a spy, with his Zelig-like ability to fade into the background, to be a born assimilator, but Mr. Lee slyly suggests the opposite: the immigrant's assimilated son is a born spy.

What is the cost of being a born spy? Henry Park's American wife, Lelia, finds him detached and cold. One of the novel's best passages concerns the Korean housekeeper who raised Henry after his mother's death. All his life, Henry has treated
her as a mere employee, and his wife is first bewildered, then horrified, to learn that he doesn't even know the woman's name; he has always called her by the Korean equivalent of "ma'am."
Who is this man she has married? Lelia wonders. It's a moment of deep mutual strangeness. Like a spy, the truly multicultural person seems to have several identities; that's the flip side of being no one
at all. Mr. Lee's novel delves adroitly into our fascination with the plasticity of identity.

Equally moving are scenes recalling Henry Park's estrangement from his father, a successful grocer so imbued with the habits of work that at home he'd take one bite of an apple -- reflexively sampling for freshness -- and then put it down. Mr.
Lee treads this familiar immigrant ground with skill and feeling, showing how father and son wield their respective languages to wound each other, and how Mr. Park's creed of hard work initially appears to
Henry as mindless sacrifice and stoicism. Yet after his father's death that creed creates deep anguish and remorse in the son. "What belief did I ever hold in my father," Henry asks, "whose daily
life I so often ridiculed and looked upon with such abject shame?"

Somewhat surprisingly, given all this hurt, "Native Speaker" offers a hopeful take on America's traditional role as beacon to the world. When Lelia remarks to Henry's father that a Korean street in Queens must look and sound just like
one in Korea itself, the grocer demurs. "My father explained to her how if she looked carefully at the people she'd see the extra spring in their steps, the little boost everyone had, just by the idea
of where they were. 'Look, look,' he implored her, crouched, slapping the pavement with both hands. 'This is an American street.' "

"Native Speaker" has some glaring flaws. Its plot is implausible and overblown; the tense shifts unnecessarily in mid-novel, producing sentences like "Yesterday we're in Ozone Park"; and central characters like John Kwang exist
less in their own right than as father figures trucked in as therapy for the narrator. Mr. Lee's prose is wildly uneven as well, its tone now breezy and ironic, now ponderously melodramatic: "A good spy
is but the secret writer of all moments imminent"; "I celebrate every order of silence borne of the tongue and the heart and the mind." Whole hunks of "Native Speaker" exist at a level of
quality far below the novel's best moments. You feel like taking up a paring knife.

That Mr. Lee can make these mistakes and still have something fine to offer shows just how talented he is. When you're done with the paring knife, what you have left is a tender meditation on love, loss and family. Here, for example, is Henry Park
recalling the table rituals of his childhood:

"As we sat down, my mother cracked two eggs into my father's bowl, one into mine, and then took her seat between us at the table before her Spartan plate of last night's rice and kimchi and cold mackerel (she only ate leftovers at lunch),
and then we shut our eyes and clasped our hands, my mother always holding mine extra tight, and I could taste on my face the rich steam of soup and the call of my hungry father offering up his most patient prayers
to his God."

Hidden inside "Native Speaker" is a memoir struggling to get out -- a rapturous evocation of a past life, viewed across a great gap of time and culture. I wish Chang-rae Lee had scrapped the spy stuff and written that book. His Father's
Rules

My father would not have believed in the possibility of sub-rosa vocations. He would have scoffed at the notion. He knew nothing of the mystical and neurotic. It wasn't part of his makeup. . . . For him, the world -- and by that I must mean this
very land, his chosen nation -- operated on a determined set of procedures, certain rules of engagement. These were the inalienable rights of the immigrant.

I was to inherit them, the legacy unfurling before me this way: You worked from before sunrise to the dead of night. You were never unkind in your dealings, but then you were not generous. Your family was your life, though you rarely saw them. You kept
close handsome sums of cash in small denominations. You were steadily cornering the market in self-pride. You drove a Chevy and then a Caddy and then a Benz. You never missed a mortgage payment or a day of church.
You prayed furiously until you wept. You considered the only unseen forces to be those of capitalism and the love of Jesus Christ. . . .

He died during the night. In the morning I went to wake him and his jaw was locked open, his teeth bared, cursing the end to its face. He was still gripping the knob of the brass bedpost. . . . Gritty mule. I thought he was never going to die. From "Native
Speaker."